48o 



Leprosy in India. 



[part II. 



of children in the family. The cases of leper-marriages in the Asylum have been 

 excluded, as well as one in which the age of attack in the parent was unknown : — 



TABLE XXII. 



Age of Attach and Number of Children of Married Lepers. 



The chief interest connected with these figures lies in the fact that they appear 

 to supply a means of, in a great degree, explaining, for this country at all events, 

 the apparent preference of the disease to follow the female line of descent. The 

 tendency to follow the female line is possibly, however, also, partially due in 

 many districts, such as Kumaon, to the greater frequency of the tuberculated form 

 of leprosy among males than females — that form usually appearing at an earlier age 

 than the anaesthetic. 



Returning to the question of increase in the leper population, we must, in 

 order to arrive at any definite conclusion, endeavour to obtain further information as 

 to the number of children born in other leper families and the proportion of them 

 who become leprous. The only data at our disposal in the present instance consist 

 of those furnished by the family history of those of the lepers whose parents 

 were leprous. Seventeen such cases exist, and the particulars of these are embodied 

 in Table XXIII. 



We have here 17 leprous families containing 21 leprous parents giving 68 

 children, of whom 27 are leprous. This is a larger proportion of children, and a 

 very much larger proportion of leprous children, than is given by the other set of 

 cases (Table XXI), where, reckoning all those cases in which those married are both 

 lepers, and allowing for the cases appearing in both columns, we have 52 lepers 

 with 101 children, and 5 leprous children. The numerical data before us, illustrating 

 the extent to which a manifestly leprous parent may determine the predisposition 

 to the disease in his own immediate offspring, may be thus summarised : —To 79 

 leprous persons 169 children were born ; 34 of these are known to have died 

 prematurely. Among the remaining 135 children leprosy has already manifested itself 

 in 32 cases, or in 23 '7 per cent., nearly one-fourth of the total number. This, too. 



